Monday 11 June 2012

Heading down the information superhighway



Back when the net was young it went by the name of the 'information superhighway'. It was a road in cyberspace you got to by unplugging your phone and waiting for two minutes every time you went to a new web page. It's somewhere you went to surf and hang out in chatrooms. Not work. It wasn't so functional and damn slick as it is now. You'd still see <text>inline tags that hadn't been closed properly.<text>
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But the name 'information superhighway' is pretty much obsolete now, just as the internet it described is all but gone. It's suffered the same fate as Route 66 did at the hands of the great Interstates. An ever increasing volume of traffic is shooting across the lanes of web 2.0. Yet everyone is in such a hurry to get their information they've all but forgotten about the poor old 'information superhighway' that lies, abandoned, right alongside their slick html5 pages.Sand blows through its old watering holes. You can hang out in the chatrooms for days and not meet a soul.

What words that are now so on trend will be next pass from the language? A lot of people have bet a lot of money that we'll keep saying 'facebook me' for the next hundred years. If they'd had a proper thing about how internet terminology comes and goes, and the period in the internet's history it stands for along with it, they probably shouldn't have.

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